Alexander Takes Washington

By Roger Rosenblatt

At the National Gallery, an ancient hero in hiding

If our friends the Iranians are a mite edgy about the fact that Alexander the Great has been summoned to Washington, no one will blame them. The last time Mr. Great dropped in on Persia, he took it, and even now, 2,300 years later, his power is formidable. These days it resides in objects--cups, armor, coins, earrings as huge as civilizations--all aglow like ideas in the gray, composed rooms of Washington's National Gallery of Art. The exhibition of Macedonian and Hellenistic art--paid for in part by Time Inc. --is called "The Search for Alexander." It opened last week for a five-month run at the National Gallery, after which it will travel for two years to museums in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and New York. It is less a show than an essay.

But what a subject for an essay: Alexander the brave, the learned, the musical; Alexander the driven, the murderous, perhaps the mad. Alexander the god. Alexander the drunk. His head dominates the exhibition. In one room there is a congress of his heads, white heads on pillars as if on spears, all facing each other in objective admiration. The ones in the center of the room are spotlit from the ceiling; their shadows make stars on the carpet. It is said that Alexander's real head slept with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under the pillow. But what went on inside?

That may not be the only question the designers of the exhibition had in mind when they arranged it, but the question is unavoidable. The selections were made by J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery, Professor Nicholas Yalouris, inspector-general of the antiquities of Greece, and other experts, all of whom know how to develop a hypothesis as well as an exhibition. The installation affects a quest. It is divided among three distinct, sequential sections that draw one from room to room, back in time from Alexander comic strips and a Daumier cartoon to a final, wine-dark chamber where a wreath of gold leaves and acorns hangs over a gold larnax, or chest, in which Philip II's bones might have lain. The tomb at Vergina in which these treasures were discovered was unearthed in 1977 by Greek Archaeologist Manolis Andronikos. It may not actually be Philip's, but it is pleasant to think it is. In any case, Philip's head is exhibit No. 1 in the show. Even with the nose off, it is one fine head--wide-browed, witty, cross. Spencer Tracy could have played it.

Only one other head in history could have told such a head where to get off; and in fact Alexander did put down his father once, at Philip's wedding feast. Philip had left the wild and crazy Olympias, Alexander's mother, to marry a Macedonian girl younger than Alexander himself (then 18). At the feast, Attalus, a warrior, expressed the hope that their union would bring a legitimate heir to the Macedonian throne, thus implying that Alexander was a bastard. Alexander responded by pitching a goblet at Attalus' head. That set off a brawl during which Philip (probably soused) drew his sword, tripped and tumbled. "Look, men," said Alexander, not one for losing battles. "He's getting ready to cross from Europe to Asia, and he falls crossing from couch to couch."

The search proposed in this exhibition is a search for no ordinary man. Was he in fact a man at all, or were the embalmers justified in trembling before his dead body for fear of touching a god? He certainly acted like a god. At the age of 16 he crushed a Thracian rebellion and founded a city that he named after himself, the first of many. After Philip's death Alexander, all of 20, conquered Greece, won its allegiance, then went off on a war of revenge against Persia. Thebes rebelled; he razed it to the ground (with remorse). He won the battle of Issus, ending Asiatic rule in the Mediterranean. He then took Tyre and Egypt, and defeated Darius, leader of the Persian empire, at Gaugamela in what was the most important battle in antiquity since it made way for the Hellenistic age, which lasted from Alexander's death in 323 B.C. to the time of Augustus, some 20 years before the birth of Jesus. When Alexander died of a fever at 32, his kingdom reached from Illyria on the west to Kashmir on the east, or from Egypt to China. He never lost a battle.

Nor was he some cheap conquistador. His vision of empire was diverse, humanistic; he brought historians and botanists with his armies. According to Plutarch, Alexander saw all men as existing under the rule of a single god. He acted as if he did not merely seek to conquer all creation but also to make sense of it. Like all Greeks, he worshiped Dionysus and reason too. He cut through the Gordian knot, but he was not always so straightforward. He went to visit Diogenes in Corinth because Diogenes would not visit him, and found the philosopher sunbathing. The future conqueror of half the world then asked Diogenes if there was anything he might do for him. "Yes," said Diogenes. "I would have you stand from between me and the sun." Alexander's soldiers laughed at the dull impudence. But Alexander remarked that if he were not Alexander he would choose to be Diogenes.

The stories go on like that--the taming of Bucephalus, the horse that refused to be mounted by anyone but the teenage Alexander; the close friendship with his co-commander Hephaestion (whose head is also on display) and the lavish funeral he gave Hephaestion, whom he regarded as another self; the infamous murder of his kinsman Cleitus, which started off as a barroom brawl and wound up with Cleitus having the last word--before Alexander hurled a spear into his heart.

At Alexander's own death, the whole world seemed to wail. So important was he even in death that his general Ptolemy hijacked the funeral car, so that the man-god might be buried close to him in Egypt. Caesar paid homage to his tomb; Mark Antony too, in all probability. After death came the hagiographies. After those, the legends. There is the Alexander of romance, the Christian saint, the Parsee terror, the knight. He appears in the Koran. The Jews revere him. He covers the globe. Then, as if that were not enough, he is said to have ascended to heaven while still alive, and also to the bottom of the sea in a diving bell, where the fish paid their respects.

How then do you get close to such a man? The objects in the exhibition are merely touchstones: a helmet he might have worn, the color of a shallow sea; a silver rhyton, or drinking horn, in the shape of a deer's head, from which he might have drunk; coins that his father had minted in 356 B.C., the year of his birth, commemorating Philip's entering a race horse in the Olympic Games (a sign of acceptance by the Greeks). Heads, Zeus; tails, a jockey. Alexander might have handled those coins.

Then there are all those heads--idealized, of course. They still might evoke the original. Yet one is sullen, one effeminate. One makes him out to be a thug, another a dope. In one the chin is feeble. In another the eyes are dazed. The best of the lot is the one from Pella, his birthplace and the center of his father's kingdom. It is based loosely on the 4th century portraits by Lysippos, Alexander's chosen artist. In that head at least are both the athlete and the thinker, the head atilt with speculation or a reflex. Yet Alexander is not there either--not the Alexander who strolled with Aristotle; or the one who pored over Xenophon; or the Alexander who would only run in the Olympic Games against other kings, since they would not throw the race to him; or the Alexander who envied Achilles because Homer had made him immortal.

In a way, the fact of the exhibition brings Alexander closer than any of its parts. It testifies to his fame. That is what he craved, after all. And he craved fame in a world where such cravings were honorable. Some say that he traded for fame with the gods, exchanging a brief life for a long thereafter. Hamlet tells Horatio that Alexander's fame came to nothing: "To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he finds it stopping a bunghole?" Still, his fame has come this far. His tomb was on display for 700 years and he is not through yet.

The question of motive remains, however. Perhaps it is not an individual matter. The strange, neatly fragmented world of the exhibition is not our world; we clump through it like dinosaurs. For one thing, theirs was a time of simple weapons and elaborate drinking cups. Ours is the reverse. For another, we see death as sleep, and they saw it as an eternal feast, an all-night bash. In short, the ancients would have recognized the code of a Gordon Liddy. But what are most of us to make of a time when war required no explanations or apologies, when generals fought in the middle of their troops, and when it was almost reasonable for a leader, say Alexander, to pluck a spear from his lung so that he could seize more land than he could possibly govern?

Or maybe it never happened that way. There is more myth than fact to Alexander. Perhaps he was in reality a flocculating maniac (with such a mother, why not?), barely containable to his men, the bane of Hephaestion's existence, Aristotle's worst pupil, and so forth. Who will ever know? There is a sentence on the final wall of the exhibition: "The search continues . . ." It provides the exhibition's one hokey moment, and it is also misleading, suggesting as it does that a continuing search for Alexander will yield something. The tomb may be unearthed eventually, but not Alexander. If all that marble and gold do not reveal him, neither will his bones.

This is no "ooh" and "aah" exhibition. There are a few startling things: the wreath and the larnax; the bronze greaves that could have been Philip's, and show one leg to have been considerably shorter than the other; the 3-ft.-high bronze krater, or urn, found in a grave at Derveni, encircled by Dionysian figures going through the motions of a languid orgy. And there will be several miniature oohs at the smaller bronzes and the medallions and the three ears of wheat fashioned in gold, life-size and perfect (used as a funerary offering). But the main effect of the show will come after it has left the eyes and visitors begin to mull over the enormity of what is implied here. Most exhibitions create silence. This one should cause insistent talk. How else should we respond to a man who was once the world?

--By Roger Rosenblatt

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.